SPID 7 – Remaking Ultima V – Warriors of Destiny for NES

I will be posting SPIDs (Slashie’s Project Idea Drafts) in the blog, they will be short ideas for games or other projects I may or may not develop into full projects. May be someone will be inspired by them and save me the trouble of developing them.

The Ultima VI engine for DOS was pretty nice, it transitioned from a dual scale to a single integrated world where you could interact in a lot more of ways with the elements on it. It was so good that it was reused for the awesome Savage Empire and Martian Dreams games

However things didn’t work well when they tried to implement it on less powerful platforms. Ultima VI for C64, for example, tried to replicate the engine with not so good results.

Then we have the FCI NES Ultima games; The ports for U3 and U4 were decent, mixing the graphic style and even the gameplay from contemporary jRPGs, they provided a good experience (specially the U4 one) by adapting the Ultima theme to the capabilities of the console. Then came U5, and for some reason they tried something different: Trying to replicate the Ultima 6 engine into the NES for it.

The result was a game that was almost impossible to play and also severely reduced the plot of the original. The NES was just not able to handle something like this… it would take the power of the SNES to make a decent effort of replicating it (as we could see in the fairly good U6 SNES port).

So, what if we could fix this? fulfill the original vision of the game in a more powerful platform? Looking at the maps from the original game I see some potential for exploring Britannia and their dungeons in a way not many people has been able to, because of the issues of the game format. The idea would be to keep the same restrictions on graphics, but removing all the performance and user experience issues (and yes, fixing the damn music).

Would one alternative be using nuvie? As far as I know they focus on reading the data files from the original games, so I’m not sure if it’d be doable or practical to create an entire new game. So maybe the best bet would be starting from scratch and reverse engineer everything into it.